Hi.
A couple of things you might be interested in
1 ) The Sunny Blue wiki no longer needs to be secret, though I’m not linking to it until I’m a little more certain that it’s not going to be trashed by spambots …. www.sunnyblue.net/wiki/

2 ) When I worked at the NHM I suggested before the wesite redesign that RSS feeds would be a good basis for a lot of the architecture particularly the news section. In fact I suggested that we build the whole thing using simple pieces of customised open source software which would a) be cheap both in terms of development effort and cost and b) be flexible because you would define the whole site as a series of interfaces so that the underlying software could be replaced or re-implemented in a bit by bit manner rather than having to replace everything in one go with a monolithic off the shelf product*, fairly standard practice these days I would have thought.

Anyway thanks to the website feed43 I’ve been able to build a Natural History Museum news feed in about 5 minutes.

[edit] extra bonus thing ) I saw the video for Cameo’s ‘Word Up’ on the weekend and it stars, amongst all the cod pieces and shoulder pads, a young Geordi La Forge (Levar Burton if my credit recollection is acurate, it’s wierd how those names are so burned into my memory. See also: the A-Team credits). Just thought I’d add that, didn’t really deserve a whole post of its own.

*hint to organisations, if you have fewer than 5 non-technical staff updating a website you probably don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a content management system esp. if most of your content resides in databases which are not compatible with the supplier you have chosen. If you decide you do need to spend this much money (perhaps for political reasons) you’re probably better off paying some people to write one for you that matches your needs exactly. Not thinking of anywhere in particular obviously.